It is no accident that the ”left”, the supporters of disengagement, reclaimed the national colour, blue, while the radical right wing stayed away from it.
In an interview on Newsnight, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon’s deputy and the leader of the Labour Party, repeated an often overlooked truth. ”We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography,” he said. The desire to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel is seen by most Jewish Israelis as a liberal aspiration, rather than a racist one, as it would appear elsewhere.
The disengagement from Gaza is considered a step in the right direction because it will cut off about 1,3-million Palestinians from Israel’s responsibility, thus improving the demographic balance between Israelis and Palestinians in the territories that remain under Israeli control. All this, at the very low price of removing 8 000 of the 400 000 settlers in the occupied territories.
The state, according to Zionists, must be Jewish — with a Jewish majority. It is an approach that enjoys international endorsement. That is despite the fact that the 1947 United Nations resolution, which gave Israel legitimacy, envisaged a state with only a 55% Jewish population and therefore, taking into account birth-rate differences, implicitly accepted that Jewish national rights could be accommodated in a state without a numerical majority.
Once a ”problem” is recognised, a ”solution” must be found, and proposals vary across the political spectrum. The right promotes expulsion of Palestinians. A ”centrist” notion is exchanging territories of dense Arab population with the Palestinian state-to-be (thus stripping thousands of Israeli-Arab citizens of their citizenship). The centre-left believes in giving Palestinians their own state to prevent ”South Africanisation”.
The government, for its part, has already started taking ”measures” to limit the growth of the Palestinian population in Israel. For many years, Israeli-Palestinians have been prevented from bringing their spouses into Israel, or being able to get them citizenship.
Now that ”demography” seems to be a perfectly legitimate excuse, the state is speaking more clearly. New laws make it practically impossible for non-Israeli spouses of Palestinians to become Israeli citizens.
Sharon fathered the idea of ”giving away” parts of Israel proper that are densely populated by Arab citizens to the Palestinian Authority. He has backed off from the idea, but it refuses to disappear and is now often heard from people who consider themselves liberals. The idea that people’s citizenship can be stripped if they belong to the ”wrong” ethnicity is clearly racist, but has gained popularity in Israel.
After the disengagement from Gaza, Israelis who like to describe themselves as the ”sane camp” will need to start redefining their political goals. Many of them will stay united behind Sharon’s leadership, and the ethno-centrist assumptions that define it. But many others know that the struggle for ”normality” can never succeed without ending the occupation of the West Bank as well as Gaza.
The chances of attaining these goals may now seem slim, but such an alliance is vital for a new state which renounces racism, rather than what amounts to ethnically cleansing the Arabs. If it does not happen, then the orange and the blue risk mixing again into a rather ugly colour.
Daphna Baram is an Israeli journalist based in London